Making the Number: How to Use Sales Benchmarking to Drive Performance

by Greg Alexander, Aaron Bartels, Mike Drapeau

The essential tool kit to achieve breakthrough sales performance improvements.Numbers don’t 40 percent of all salespeople miss their targets each year. How can sales managers ensure their teams are doing everything possible? The key lies in benchmarking, which is not new for finance or manufacturing but rarely gets applied to sales. Making the Number will teach executives to embrace data-driven decision making and rely less on gut instinct.Comparing a sales force to those of relevant peers leads to many opportunities to improve performance. The authors take readers through their five-step methodology for sales benchmarking, showing how to select metrics; gather, compute, and compare internal and external data; and then actually use the data.Making the Number includes case studies of sales benchmarking in action. For example, find out how Discover Financial Services plays David to the Goliaths of MasterCard and Visa.Whether you’re a sales rep, a manager, or a CEO, this book will show you a better way to make your number.

Genres: Business

332 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 16, 2008

Reviews

[E · Rating 4 out of 5]

Innovative advice on improving sales

Forget any fears of math or statistics that may still linger from your days in school. Sales benchmarking is a powerful tool that requires much less math and IT than you might expect. It yields hard numbers that show precisely how well you are competing, what gaps you need to close, how to create more value for your customers and how to improve your sales team’s results. Greg Alexander, Aaron Bartels and Mike Drapeau provide a very readable explanation of what kind of tool sales benchmarking is, how to prepare to implement it, how to use it for fun and profit, and how to overcome common implementation difficulties. Although the authors are sales benchmarking consultants, their book does not read like self-promotion. getAbstract finds that they provide solid, helpful information as they explain the practical uses of sales benchmarking.

[Osen Akkemik · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book made me think the things That i ignore most of the time. Very well structured, comprehensive enough yet not repetitive which is hard to find as a business book. All I have to do now is to apply what i learned from this book to my day to day job.